I was supposed to be in New Delhi yesterday. I had an acquaintance from US going through the city and it was a perfect chance to get to know each other. He’s from my profession too and well, I admit, part of the zeal to meet up stemmed from a greed that something might come […]

Of all the strange things one hears and is subjected to, my most recent encounter has been with two people who’ve more or less said the same thing on the same day. Typical of law of averages, things happen in clusters and I’ve had 2 incidents of the same thing within today. I’ll paraphrase what […]

One thing that I’m finding increasingly happening on blogs and something I just don’t get is the need to make predictions. You go anywhere and somebody is either predicting or pointing to such a prediction either agreeing or disagreeing. I call this The Soothsayer Effect. But really, what’s the point? It’s so darned easy to […]

All of a sudden, I’m finding more and more people using the term ‘Bangalored’ to mean something that has been outsourced. Statements like “They’re Bangaloring it to Asia” and “More IT jobs are getting Bangalored to China than to India now”. Dunno who coined the term but it’s picking up fast. Turns out (and I […]

I sent out a small one liner in the office about starting a Mexican Wave. I received many responses and ended up on this particular page: Mexican Waves (Laola) – A quantitative analysis of the propagating human wave. Good stuff.

Came across the story India Emerges as Innovation Hub on Wired today. It highlights 4 technologies in development in India that are aimed at rural/backward areas of the country and which could find widespread use in the so-called Third World countries: Script Mail (a regional language handwriting recognition & mailing system) – HP Research Centre, […]

My friends at UCIL got interviewed and published on Sunday in Hindustan Times. I’ve been associated with them for over 4 years now. My first decent job (and the second in total) was at the cybercafe UCIL’s CEO Anuj and his elder brother Amit had started way back in ’99. We were the first cybercafe […]

That’s Jacob Nielsen speaking in his latest Alertbox. It is an excellent article where he talks about how the user experience is so governed by ‘accepted norms’ that a non-standard design implementation will only alienate your users and make them go elsewhere.

Well at least right now most of Lagos (that’s the commercial capital of Nigeria) believes that if you answer a call from certain numbers, dubbed ‘killer numbers’, you will drop dead immediately. Immediately. Right there. Poof! Gone! Us humans seem to lose our capacity of individual thought in masses. We easily believe in and will […]

Life never ceases to amaze me with some rather bizarre incidents popping up every now and then. “I thought, ‘I hope they didn’t bury me on my birthday’,” Lunkov told the Moscow Times after visiting his grave in southeastern Moscow. “But it turns out they did.” 😀 Update: Some other miscellaneous ones. Spider catches a […]

I just came across a funny story on The Inquirer which provides info on how Hackers got hacked by a hacker! I’ve usually heard of stories about this, especially the tiff between pro-India and pro-Pakistan hackers/crackers/script-kiddies a few years back when they went on a site-defacement spree. But this is a pretty detailed account of […]

The Indian national daily The Hindu has reported that the Indian President, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has “advised defence scientists to shun proprietary systems and opt for open source codes to enhance software security in defence networks.” Open source codes can easily introduce the users to build security algorithms in the system without the dependence […]

Driven by the lack of fresh talent involved in creating political ads, Laura Dawn, David Fenton, Moby, Eli Pariser, Lee Solomon, and Jonathan Soros launched Bush In 30 Seconds. [Bush in 30 Seconds is] an ad contest that’s intended to bring new talent and new messages into the world of mainstream political advertising. We’re looking […]

The Times of India reports that in light of Marvel Comics’ plan to indianise the superhero to take advantage of the popularity brought on by the two motion pictures, “Peter Parker of Queens, the hero under the classic Spiderman mask, will be replaced by a young, Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar” from Mumbai (Once upon […]